4M

I’m one hundred pages into Tribe of Mentors, a book in which Tim Ferriss asks all sorts of people eleven questions. One of those questions is, “When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do?” Do you know what the most of the respondents reference as a solution? Movement. Many of them recognise the two-way connection between mind and body, the deft intertwining of psychology and physiology. And they leverage it. They cite stretching, walks, cold showers, breathing exercises, weight training and more as physiological solutions to unfavourable psychological states.

Because of this, I’ve formulated a dictum that I’ve wrote on a 4×6 index card in red pen and hung next to my desk: Movement modifies mood. Massively.

On the back of the card, I’ve included some movement commands, some things I can do to pull myself out of a hole: “spin around”, “shake your limbs”, “roll on the floor”, “hang”, “jump up and down”, “crawl”, “stretch your hips”, “be a yoga master”, “walk”, “cycle”, “make a kettlebell dance”, “massage with a lacrosse ball”, “make noise”, and finally, “breathe”. By obeying one of these movement commands when I feel unfocused, unmotivated, or uninspired, I hope to rewire my mental state. By moving my body, I hope to move my mind.